How Scientific Is Modern Medicine?

By Dana Ullman, North Atlantic Books. Posted December 3, 2007.

The following is an excerpt from The Homeopathic Revolution: Why Famous People and Cultural Heroes Choose Homeopathy, by Dana Ullman.

Conventional medicine adherents have consistently asserted that its methods are scientifically verified, and they have ridiculed other methods that are suggested to have therapeutic or curative effects. In fact, conventional physicians have consistently worked to disallow competitors, even viciously attacking those in their own profession who have questioned conventional treatments or provided alternative modalities.

And yet, strangely enough, whatever has been in vogue in conventional medicine in one decade has been declared ineffective, dangerous, and sometimes barbaric in the ensuing decades. Surprisingly, despite this pattern in history, proponents and defenders of "scientific medicine" tend to have little or no humility, continually asserting that today's cure is truly effective.

The good news about conventional medicine and one of its remarkable features for which it should be honored is its history of consistently and repeatedly disproving its own treatments. The fact that only a handful of conventional drugs have survived thirty or more years is strong testament to the fact that conventional medicine is honorable enough to acknowledge its mistakes.

Medical history uncovers an obvious pattern in the discovery and application of drug treatments. Initially, there is great excitement about a new drug's discovery. Research has seemingly proven its safety and efficacy and leads to widespread appreciation for the drug's ability to provide relief. Over time, there are minor concerns about the drug's side effects, until more research and clinical practice uncover more serious concerns about its side effects. Then, more research and clinical experience lead to more serious questions about the drug's real safety and efficacy, until there is general acknowledgment that the drug doesn't work as well as previously assumed, and there is recognition of an increasingly long list of serious side effects over time. However, these problems are not really problems because a new drug emerges, with short-term research that suggests it is a better drug after all. That is, until new research con- firms that it is neither as effective nor as safe as previously thought. And the cycle has continued like this for a century or more.

Like the fashion industry with its regular changes in style, the drug industry makes its profits on the newest drugs rather than on the older ones -- and not just any profits, but sickeningly high profits.

In 2002, the combined profits ($35.9 billion) of the ten largest drug companies in the Fortune 500 were more than the combined profits ($33.7 billion) of the remaining 490 companies together (Angell, 2004, 11).1 The only reason these drug companies did not maintain this shocking financial advantage is that the oil companies' profits have increased considerably with the Iraq War, thus raising the 490 non-drug companies' profits slightly higher. But then again, one would assume that the profits of 490 of the largest companies in the world would be substantially more than just ten companies in one commercial field. This economic information is important, even essential, because learning how to separate the "science" of medicine from the business of medicine has never been more difficult. The combined efforts of the drug companies and the medical profession, which together may be called the "medicalindustrial complex," have been wonderfully effective in convincing consumers worldwide that modern medicine is the most scientific discipline that has ever existed. Before discussing homeopathy, it is important, if not necessary, to raise basic questions about what "scientific"medicine is -- and is not.

Physicians today rarely run drug companies. Instead, businessmen run them. It is, therefore, not surprising that Marcia Angell,MD, a Harvard professor of medicine and former editor of the famed New England Journal of Medicine , wrote:

Over the past two decades the pharmaceutical industry has moved very far from its original high purpose of discovering and producing useful new drugs. ... Now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit, this industry uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the U.S. Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself. (Levi, 2006)

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Dana Ullman is the author of seven leading books on homeopathy.

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